It’s been a while I was looking for material to improve my Japanese, getting to know more kanji, knowing words and expressions. I’ve been trying to read the short news on the NHK easy website, but I wasn’t really into it. Since the content is changing almost every day, you don’t see any form of progress or rewards.

But these days I’ve been in Paris for work and decided to stop by the Japanese bookshop there, it was literally 15 minutes away from the workplace. It’s quite a big place, with two floors, comparing to what you can find in Lyon… nothing. So I just went there straight after work to take a look and stumbled across the easy-to-read and recommended book section. And there was this book, called the 「54字の物語」, literally “Stories in 54 characters”. The lady told me the required kanji level for this was similar to what primary school students knows in Japan and on each page, you get a simple explanation of the previous page’s short text. So I decided to give it a shot.

To spice things up, and since there is 90 stories, I thought it could be cool to challenge myself to read one per day. But, to be sure everything was understood and to keep on doing it, I had to write the translation down somewhere. You know how it is easy to just let something go and forget about it. I had no intention in ruining the book by writing on it. I didn’t think it would either fit a blog post, so I went with Instagram stories instead. It seemed like a good place: picture, to show the original story, text, to write the translation on it and also a pin functionality on the profile, to keep them in one place, separated from the other random stuff I can share. Nice!

So here you go, I currently read and “translated” half of the book you can now watch here:

Along the way, I noticed a few things that made this book even more interesting. A lot of stories are made according to a pattern: a normal situation is described followed by a pun or a weird element that completely change the understanding of the situation. For example, in the first pages, there’s a funny story that made me laugh:

“During important moments of my trip abroad, the dictionary my father gave me saved me many times ! But, I don’t want to go in countries without toilet paper in the restroom anymore.” If you didn’t understand the joke, the guy probably had to use his dictionary to wipe himself, just saying.

In an even more creative way, I found a story that is sort of an Easter egg. In Japan, unlike France, a lot of books have a dust cover and, sometimes, even a promotional belly-band, called obi coming from the Japanese kanji 帯. These are usually better crafted than the underlying cover. The paper is often soft or shiny and colorful, unlike the simple and monochrome cover it protects. And a lot of manga I’ve been reading often hide small drawings there, like funny cartoons related or not to the story you can find inside. K-ON!, for example, had these silly 4-cases short stories, Fullmetal Alchemist had one black cartoon per pure white cover… This has also inspired foreign drawers to make their own, French manga-like Lastman for example. It has this sex scene (nothing graphical) under the dust cover with the main character saying “what are you looking at?”. It makes the undercover a private place where things shouldn’t be seen but you’d still want to peek in. It can also be kind of a tool to hide what wouldn’t have been accepted in a library or simply random thoughts and sketches not matching the content.

When I removed the dust cover to see what’s inside — note that I’ve been so used to these, it’s almost a mechanical thing to do when I buy a book with a dust cover now — I found a short story, how surprising… But I didn’t immediately notice it was a different story from the one on the dust cover, the latter being just a retake from the book. So when I read it, I’d wanted to clap the author for such a clever note.

Undercover story: Thanks for reading this far. I’m happy! But, as it is a bit cold, could you put back the cover?

This simple short story reflects the humor the entire book is made of and this comparison with the cover of the book being wore to stay warm is brilliant I think. Congrats! 👏

I encountered another story type as well in a way they use the language itself to play with it. I remember one story where a thief stole a plate, plate whose writing was also included in the steal character, but as it was stolen, it changed the meaning of the story. I don’t remember if this was the first case of “writing play” I had seen but it sure is very clever. Either be meaning, writing or pronunciation tricks, this book has a lot to offer.

At the end of the book, the author explains a few things to make your own stories as well and share them on social networks. I might want to try writing my own stories later on, we’ll see if I feel like it.

I also thought about it since the beginning, but I’m following and supporting Dogen’s awesome lessons on Patreon about Japanese pitch-accent patterns and phonetics, and it could be nice to try recording myself pronouncing these short sentences as a way to practice.

If you understand Japanese, I encourage you to see the author’s other works, it is really interesting and I love his website: thinking.co.jp

While writing this article, I came across the announcement of the second volume, chills special, now available. Take a look at it! I’ll definitely buy it some day and might do this challenge myself one more time.

A few days ago, a friend sent me a tweet showing a map of France made of emojis representing the weather in each part of the country. I found the idea to be nice and followed the account. Here’s what it looks like:

Following this, several community managers took the opportunity to joke on the idea for the brands they were representing. It quickly became a meme Yahoo UK even reported it.

Another friend of mine sent me a roughly made version of Brittany, the France’s region I am from, that he wanted to make aswell. This got me the idea to look online for a Japan version of it with the corresponding words, tenki 天気 for weather, emoji 絵文字 which is originally a japanese word. But I didn’t find anything, so it was a little project that I could build for fun.

The same way I made the Twitter bot for my flying potato, I decided to go with simple free services not asking for so much maintenance. Hook.io was one of the solution I had known that stores scripts online and executes them through a URL, as simple as I needed. A thing I didn’t know before but that is very nice, is the ability to have your script directly on Github Gists and having it pulled automatically by hook.io, making it really easy to update your code unlike AWS Lambda for example.

With that settled, I started coding the script with the twitter package on NPM. I don’t know how it will go for the future but Twitter is actually updating its developer platform as I write these lines. So, for now, I used the former apps, gaving me the customer key / secret and the access token / secret I needed to tweet on behalf of an account. The code then, is rather simple:

And now onto the real problem, drawing the map and finding the weather. For the first one, I just went to my Twitter and played around with spaces and the Sun emoji on the input text… I quickly ran out of characters since Japan is a wide country but thanksfully, japanese full-width space is wide and only takes 2 characters like emojis. So here’s my Japan emoji map:

If you think you can do better, don’t hesitate to send me your result, I would glady update my script.

To get the weather information, I used Yahoo Weather API through a SQL-like language they made, YQL. All the information I needed on the data it gives me was the climate code under the condition key. Yahoo also uses a thing called woeid to represents places. So I made a list of places I thought the best and send it in only one request.

select item.condition from weather.forecast where woeid in (1, 2, 3...)

Now I only had to map the results to emojis. Here’s the list from what I thought was the best:

code

emoji

name

0

🌪️

tornado

1

🌀

tropical storm

2

🌀

hurricane

3

⛈

severe thunderstorms

4

⛈

thunderstorms

5

🌧️

mixed rain and snow

6

🌧️

mixed rain and sleet

7

🌨️

mixed snow and sleet

8

🌧️

freezing drizzle

9

🌧️

drizzle

10

🌧️

freezing rain

11

💦

showers

12

💦

showers

13

❄

snow flurries

14

🌨️

light snow showers

15

❄

blowing snow

16

❄

snow

17

🌨️

hail

18

🌨️

sleet

19

🤔

dust (I don t know for this one yet)

20

🌁

foggy

21

🌫️

haze

22

🌫️

smoky

23

💨

blustery

24

🍃

windy

25

🥶

cold

26

☁

cloudy

27

☁

mostly cloudy (night)

28

🌥️

mostly cloudy (day)

29

☁

partly cloudy (night)

30

🌤️

partly cloudy (day)

31

🌑

clear (night)

32

☀

sunny

33

🌑

fair (night)

34

☀

fair (day)

35

🌧

mixed rain and hail

36

🥵

hot

37

⚡️

isolated thunderstorms

38

🌩️

scattered thunderstorms

39

🌩️

scattered thunderstorms

40

🌧

scattered showers

41

❄

heavy snow

42

🌨

scattered snow showers

43

❄

heavy snow

44

🌤

partly cloudy

45

⛈️

thundershowers

46

❄

snow showers

47

⛈️

isolated thundershowers

3200

❔

not available

Last step, making it into the tweet! Nothing more simple: dumping every variables into a template string, and sending it to Twitter. Important thing to keep in mind: Twitter trims the tweet, so you have to put something at the beginning that isn’t a space.

And voilà!

With that being done, the script works but you have to activate it yourself. To create a regular call, I thought about using hook.io cron jobs, but they didn’t seem to work at the moment I was doing this. So I went to a little service called IFTTT working on the principle: if this occurs, then do that, the bold part being chosen through services they offer. So I picked Dates and Webhooks and made it into an applet: if each day at 12pm, then calls this URL.

The service is now fully working by itself on @emoji_tenki if you want to follow it and get the weather every 6 hours. :D

I also thought about trying to make a special version with Japanese kanji representing the weather (雨、晴、雷、雪…), I might give it a shot later.

Hey everyone! A few months ago, on behalf of the company I work for, Prototypo, one of our designers, Pedro, and I headed to Germany! We held a 2-day workshop for the design faculty of Darmstadt.

We introduced eager students to our parametric technology and typefaces, while sharing our history of how parametric typefaces and Prototypo came to life. The next generation of designers sure asked us a bunch of interesting questions! We covered licenses, the app’s freedom of creation and how you can achieve the best outcome in a limited time.

The idea for the workshop was to first create a typeface in Prototypo that would be reused with the parametric font technology in the context of an animation. This would be then integrated using HTML and the animation feature of CSS3 inside a web page.

We prepared a few sketches and examples to inspire the students and give them a few ideas to start with: simple animations using squares, rectangles, circles… in combination with some flashy color backgrounds.

The workshop started on the Friday morning and, as expected, the students managed to master Prototypo quite easily. They started to refine their typeface on the very first day using different features like the manual editing.

The afternoon was a little more tricky, as we dived into coding. Applying an idea or a sketch into concrete logic is not an easy task, and as not everyone is familiar with coding, getting started was the real challenge. We started simple things using codepen.io, a really simple website that abstracts the hard part and gives you results very quickly.

The second day, we continued to refine the different compositions and integrated them in a pre-made ready-to-use project powered by Prototypo’s parametric font technology. With their pro account, students could directly import their font projects (created on Prototypo) into their animation. The only thing left to do was to explore the possibilities of the different inputs we could use (keyboard, sound…) and the different parameters we wanted to change according to these followings.

All in all, this workshop was a great experience! We’re happy to have had the opportunity to teach both type design and code. And we even had the chance to get back with cool posters made by the students!!

We hope everyone had a great time! If you’re interested in a workshop, don’t hesitate to send us an email at contact[at]prototypo.io!

At Prototypo, we had an old backend system, that wasn’t flexible, or should I say too much flexible? So when I joined the team, I had the charge to rewrite the payment system with externals AWS Lamda. I didn’t talk that much about it but I dropped some thoughts on the article about Lambda and API Gateway.

But as we were adding features and all, we felt the need to refactor the rest. I guess Hoodie is a great tech when it comes to offline-first capabilities, simple storage like Firebase does and real-time data but we didn’t need all of this. It was used in a weird way that I immediately wanted to fix. Everything was loaded at the first page load and it kept sending data everytime there was a change without anything coming down from the server. We also experienced lots of problems where people had their fonts completely reset to a previous state due to multiple active sessions at the same time.

So our needs were:

Link more data to start working on collaborating features

Real-time data coming down from the server (again, collaborating features)

BaaS (Backend as a Service) to avoid the maintenance pain

Extensibility (like webhooks) to support the different

And I was using GraphQL for another project, that seemed to me the thing to use (no hype driven development, it’s just easier to fetch the data we need). It appears that, between all solutions that exists, graph.cool was the way to go. They have done a lot for the community, they open-source pretty much everything, they’re nice and their solution has a lot to offer!

Link more data: it’s a GraphQL API (compatible with both Relay and custom solutions like Apollo)

Real-time: They support GraphQL Subscriptions

“Functions” are a way to transform or react to changes

Their project plan is free for open-source (we are \o/)

They also have a way to extend GraphQL mutations with functions

And now, let’s dig that migration!

The database was, if I may, very poorly designed. Users are registered under a _users database that contains the basic info like the email, the password and a link to the billing account. Every user is linked to a unique — or so I thought… — database to store its preferences and projects.

Transfering user accounts first

I first decided to transfer every users we had in the database and that was the easiest since CouchDB has a REST endpoint that can dump everything. Just with /_users/_all_docs?include_docs=true. That being set, I had to push them onto GraphCool without bloating the network with 40k requests, that’s when GraphQL comes to be handy, you can batch mutations to avoid sending multiple requests and sending them all at once. I split my users into groups of 100 and send them while checking no errors were found.

To avoid duplicates, I first used the same batch ability to query every users and see which one were missing. So I could use that script multiple times to push the last users that were registered before we push the new code.

The first two documents contains the preferences and the profile values, but we’ll get to this later.

Each variant has its own document stored under family_name + variant_name somewhat sanitized. Now, that makes a terrible problem that I encountered when transferring accounts. What if I’m Japanese and I want to name my font 青空 — because Blue Sky is such a great name — you end up with newfontvalues/regular and worse, if you name your variant the same way newfontvalues/. You end up with an empty document name, that’s pretty bad… So I hope that our non-latin community could forgive us for this and that it should be totally fine from now on!

Font families are stored directly on the user preferences. Every font is just a plain object that has its own variants list pointing to their databases, roughly like this:

But, as far as I know, we only get users’ databases by querying them one by one… GET /__user_database__/_all_docs?include_all=true.

This time, the script went a bit further: I needed to fetch all users, remove the non-existing common documents from both ends (GraphCool and CouchDB) and query all the data. I made up a small cache system to avoid redownloading the all thing in case of failure. That being done, I could fetch a hundred users’ databases and send in one row the mutations I needed.

I used glouton, a small utility I made before for another use case. It allows you to retry failing requests and define a concurrency limit if you don’t want to send to many requests at the same time. For this migration, the configuration was pretty straightforward:

Having everything I needed, I just had to start creating my mutations. The rough part was knowing which variant belong to which font — assuming people could and would rename them — when they were already transfered.
Basically, I only saved user_database-document_name into an oldId field that could allowed me to gather them into a family array.

When everything is done, you concatenate all the mutations and send them in one row to the server and keep going through the users. I won’t mention how I did transfer the profile infos and preferences as it is pretty much the same thing but easier.

Hey, it’s been a while! Today, I want to talk about anime again. Besides the fact that I finally watched Attack on Titans (and you should), I heard about Nichijō. It appeared to me like a reference or something, so I jumped into it. And what a weird encountering it had been.

The plot… I guess there is no plot. You just take a bunch of people, mainly high school girls and somewhat connected to each other, and watch them live. The episodes are composed with many short scenes that are independents but sometimes references are made to the past. And that’s pretty much anything I can say about it.

If you happen to love absurd scenes like I do, I advise you to watch it right now, you won’t be disappointed. And just for you, here’s a glimpse at my favorite scenes (don’t worry, you can’t really be spoiled).

Note
I think 通 (tooru) means transparent, that’s why she overreacted when hearing the word. But I have no clue for the small/short dilemma.

As a bonus, she gets back there to trick her friend a few episodes later.

And a last very funny one:

If you want more, you could check out the mosquitoes scene, or simply watch everything. ;)

I don’t really know how is seen the French music scene abroad and some people might want to discover some interesting local bands. As I am (really really) into punk related music, this is the only thing that I’ll share with you now but there’s plenty things to discover everywhere!

Punk from Paris. Started in 2003.
That band likes to criticize the living society, that’s why I considered them pure punk (that and the loud guitar and rough voice). They sing mostly in French but it happened they released songs in English. I think this is one of the best French punk reference (they toured all around the world).
They’re part of the Guerilla Asso, which gathers lots of punk artists (even from abroad).

Funny pop punk from Quiberon, Brittany. Started in 2006.
Originated from Brittany where I come from too, these guys are cool! Litterally “The 3 cheese” (referencing a pizza name in case you didn’t understand :P), they do funny (and sometimes dirty) pop punk rock inspired by Green Day, Offspring and Blink-182. Their most known song is a pray for a cheese-based French dish called “Tartiflette”.

Punk from Paris.
This band is one of the many projects Guerilla Poubelle’s member can have (you can easily recognize one of the singer’s voice). Completely pop punk, their lyrics are funny and the songs catchy. I like them for that and the crazy movie clips!

Celtic punk from Vannes.
With one of Les 3 Fromages’s member (yeah I know, they all play in each other’s band), this band makes interesting music as they use traditional instruments like tin whistle or even bagpipes. Inspired by bands like Dropkick Murphys or The Pogues, they mix Breton music, folk songs and irish classics.

Poésie Zéro

Punk from outer space.
I wanted to put this band because they have a really funny weird way to do their communication. They’re always pissed off about everything and shout at the public that they’re idiots. Sometimes you think they’re trying to educate you about society, but sometimes they’re just yelling at you. This still makes me laugh.